Government by Hysteria: The Climate and Covid Hobgoblins Begin to Fade

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Tilak Doshi

Former President Ronald Reagan famously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help”. His point was that Government “help” often leads to worse outcomes for its supposed beneficiaries. Not only have many governments been incredibly inefficient in achieving claimed objectives of helping citizens, but they have often proved to be malicious in intent: the “help” offered has been a cover to stay in power.

Liberal democracies have a limited repertoire of state-sanctioned carrots and sticks, and none of these allow governments to easily trample citizens’ rights enshrined in law such as habeas corpus or the right to trial in a court of law. There are certain norms that apply to government action in modern liberal democracies, and these cannot easily be over-ridden. We call these norms civilised.

Nonetheless, we have witnessed in our lifetimes a new mode of practical politics observed by the great essayist H. L. Mencken. He said, in so many words, that our governments manufacture imaginary hobgoblins – creatures of the mind that can be mischievous, frightening and even dangerous – and then wait for citizens to clamour for safety.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary

In serving those needs for safety, governments are more likely to get re-elected. Government by hysteria in other words, where fear and alarm are cultivated, then weaponised, for political ends.

Yet exploiting hysteria to govern, with dramatic displays of outrage or emotion, is not without challenges. Hobgoblins cannot bamboozle everyone all the time. Fear and alarm wear out, and truth matters in justifying policies that impact the livelihoods of people.   

The Climate Hobgoblins

Climate hobgoblins have been long in the making. Maurice Strong, a Canadian environmentalist and principal architect of the 1972 Stockholm conference – the first global summit to make the environment the central issue – proclaimed that “If we don’t change, our species will not survive. … Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilisation to collapse.” For mere hobgoblins, this was big stuff. These ones endangered mankind itself.

The threatening features of this genre of hobgoblins went through several permutations. It started with Paul Ehrlich’s famine and war through over-population and the Club of Rome’s prediction of inevitable resource scarcity. It then morphed into global cooling during the 1970s, before finally settling for global warming (now called ‘climate change’) due to effects of greenhouse gases. The focus is on the trace gas carbon dioxide mainly emitted by humans combusting fuels for industry, cooking, heating, cooling and transport.

The story is that the CO₂ hobgoblins are the control knob of climate and, by extension, our cataclysmic future, a theory spread via the panic of a Swedish school drop-out who deleted her predictive tweet about the end of the world by 2023. Along with the Swede Greta Thunberg (now a campaigner for Palestinian rights) are the assorted ‘climate scientists’ who have conjured up the climate hobgoblins with their global warming ‘hockey stick’ charts and their pseudoscientific climate models duly adopted by the UN’s IPCC.  

Lionel Shriver captures the climate hobgoblins’ mischievousness well:

They take temperature readings at Heathrow airport. They refuse to cite less distressing satellite readings. They attribute single weather events to climate change without supporting data. They play on the fact that up close, all natural disasters seem like the worst ever. They suppress good news, such as the recovery of the Great Barrier Reef and the fact that hurricanes have not grown more frequent – only reporting the ’hottest July on record’ without noting when the ‘record’ goes back only to 1940.

The work of the climate hobgoblins has stoked up the climate hysteria which is amplified by the mass media on almost daily basis. The deluge of catastrophic predictions regarding climate change and its consequences has reached everyone on the planet. One has only to cite the frequent hyperbolic pronouncements by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who never tires of reminding his global audience of the “climate emergency”: it is “a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable”; the “era of global boiling has arrived”, and so on ad nauseam.

John Clauser, a 2022 Nobel prize laureate in physics, finds climate alarmism “a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people”. He continues:

Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, agencies and environmentalists.

The COVID-19 Hobgoblins

If the climate hobgoblins were long in the making, the Covid variety were anything but. The first reports of COVID-19 emerged in late December 2019, when an outbreak of an unidentified form of pneumonia was reported in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began reporting on the outbreak in January 2020 with individual cases reported in Thailand and elsewhere.

By March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) had declared COVID-19 a global health emergency and named the virus “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2”. It was also in March that WHO officially declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. In the early stages of the spread in infection, countries around the world took different approaches to manage COVID-19 and reduce the spread of the virus. Most countries adopted more or less strict lockdowns (encompassing stay-at-home orders, curfews, quarantines, cordons sanitaires and similar societal restrictions) with the significant exception of Sweden which undertook limited targeted measures such as protecting the elderly and the infirm. Strict lockdowns were precluded by insufficient state capacity in the poorer countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke of common sense, ‘herd immunity’ and protecting the vulnerable. He initially rejected banning mass gatherings or imposing social distancing rules. Then, an unpublished alarmist March 16th report by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London warned of 510,000 deaths in the country if the country did not immediately adopt a suppression strategy. On March 23rd, the UK Government reversed course and imposed one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns. For the US, the professor had predicted 2.2 million deaths absent similar government controls, and there too, Ferguson’s fearful predictions of mass deaths helped move the US federal government into lockdown mode. 

Unlike climate change models that predict outcomes over a period of decades, however, it takes only days and weeks for epidemiological model forecasts to be falsified by data. Furthermore, by including all extreme weather (whether heavy snowfalls or heatwaves, droughts or floods) as results of an all-encompassing ‘climate change’, nothing could be disproven.  

But the COVID-19 hobgoblins could not provide cover for Professor Ferguson’s hysterical conjectures. Thus, by March 25th, Ferguson’s predicted half a million fatalities in the UK was adjusted downward to “unlikely to exceed 20,000”, a reduction by a factor of 25. This drastic reduction could not be credibly explained by UK’s lockdown measures which had been imposed only two days previously, before any such measures could possibly have had enough time to work.

The Corruption of Science

While the climate and COVID-19 hobgoblins may be of different genres, they share much in common. They share striking parallels in the corruption of science, with the use of models whether they be of a bogus global warming hockey-stick or runaway epidemiological fatality predictions. This inordinate dependence on speculative, not-fit-for-purpose models betray the lack of transparency and groupthink, which involves the suppression of sceptics who question the imaginary hobgoblins. 

A recent victim of the groupthink censorship is the highly eminent public health specialist Dr Jay Bhattacharya who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration which criticised the wholesale adoption of rigid lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nominated by President Trump as the next head of the National Institutes of Health, he has undergone four years of censorship, blacklisting and vilification. Dr John Clauser, who disputes the ‘climate crisis’ narrative, was similarly cancelled. He was disinvited by the IMF from a talk he was supposed to deliver and was subject to hit pieces in the mainstream media.

In the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption denounced the country’s “hysterical slide into a police state. … An irrational overreaction driven by fear”. He went on to masterfully describe the role of hysteria in politics:

The real problem is that when human societies lose their freedom, it’s not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It’s usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat. And the threat is usually a real threat but usually exaggerated. That’s what I fear we are seeing now. The pressure on politicians has come from the public. They want action. They don’t pause to ask whether the action will work. They don’t ask themselves whether the cost will be worth paying. They want action anyway. And anyone who has studied history will recognise here the classic symptoms of collective hysteria. Hysteria is infectious. We are working ourselves up into a lather in which we exaggerate the threat and stop asking ourselves whether the cure may be worse than the disease.

Hobgoblins Fade, People Wake Up

Much as people want protection from imaginary hobgoblins and their perceived threats, when governments turn tyrannical and pursue policies which cost far more than they benefit, people eventually undergo a process of disillusionment with a yearning for meaningful change. Regimes in power in turn double down on hysteria and panic-driven policies to keep the hobgoblins at bay. This causes even further impoverishment and alienation among larger sections of the population.

Rather than allocating resources and efforts towards protecting the vulnerable from COVID-19 while allowing the rest of the population to carry on with their livelihoods with individuals taking responsibility for safe socialising, most governments imposed top-down, economy-crushing lockdowns followed by mandates and exhortations to wear masks and take vaccinations and endless booster shots. And rather than mitigating real environmental threats such as ensuring water reservoirs are filled and forests are managed to safeguard against fires in California for example, the climate change establishment advocates further ‘decarbonisation’ (read deindustrialisation) to save us from extreme scenarios of global warming.

The triumphant return of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the US was the culmination of that process of disillusionment. The hobgoblins of COVID-19 and climate no longer seemed to hold sway. Rather, more people than not preferred to believe in, and vote for, a leader that dismissed the ‘climate crisis’ as a hoax and who was willing to give succour to those that refused COVID-19 vaccinations despite being threatened with the loss of jobs and ordinary freedoms.

On the first day of his administration, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders which promise to end hysteria over fearful narratives. In the areas of energy, environment and the so-called ‘climate crisis’, President Trump has instructed his administration to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, reopen Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration, temporarily withdraw all areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from offshore wind leasing, review the federal Government’s leasing and permitting practices for wind projects, declare a national energy emergency, stop radical environmentalism by “putting people over fish” to provide water to southern California; and put ‘America First’ in international environmental agreements.

With respect to issues related to COVID-19 and public health, the most consequential move Mr. Trump made in his election campaign was to unite forces with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who initially ran as an independent, and to nominate him as his next Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. On his first day, he issued an executive order to withdraw from the World Health Organisation. He also promised to “reinstate any service members who were unjustly expelled from our military for objecting to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate with full back pay”.

At his 1933 Presidential Inauguration, Franklin D. Roosevelt asserted his firm belief that “the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself”. Imaginary hobgoblins, threatening as they are, do fade away as people realise the truth.

Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, a former contributor to Forbes, and a member of the CO₂ Coalition.